Geoffrey Gilchrist was an errand boy for the Russian mob. When he could, I was betting, he traded information about them to the Brits. What choices did he have? Gilchrist was a guy who was never in his life straight about anything. He was, like he said, Cold War scrap. Him. Tommy Pascoe. My own father.
Was it only accidental the bookstore guy calling Gilchrist? Did Gilchrist somehow know I was in town? Did Kievsky tell him? Tolya Sverdloff gave me Kievsky’s name, and the dummy with my face was in the apartment Sverdloff lent me. I wondered if Tolya was in so deep he’d do anything, even shop me to his cronies. I shoved it out of my head, but I went to a phone, called Sonny Lippert and got an answering machine.
I walked back to Gilchrist’s. The blue Jag was still waiting. I turned and headed in the other direction.
At a newsstand I got a cheap umbrella and a map and started walking. Along the embankment, the swollen river on my right, rain belting down now.
I’d come to London without a plan. Some kind of idiotic impulse that I owed Frankie. It was why I went looking for Gilchrist that morning, killing time. Now I knew for sure whoever sent the message was here in London. If Gilchrist wasn’t lying.
But Geoffrey Gilchrist was a guy who had lied for two countries, and would sure as shit do it again to save his own sick ass. He flirted with me and left me hanging.
Before I had left his house, Gilchrist had said, “Have you a phone number, dear?” and I gave him the number of the apartment on the river. Maybe he’d stir things up. Flush them out. So long as I didn’t drown.
22
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
Lily Hanes stood in the doorway of the houseboat in a white turtleneck and black slacks, a gray-green silk scarf like seawater around her neck. With one hand she leaned heavily on an aluminum cane, with the other she pushed her hair off her neck like she does when she’s nervous. She said, “God, I’m glad to see you,” leaned forward and kissed me hard. “You look like shit. What’s the matter?”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“When did you get here?”
“Last night.”
“You came to London and you didn’t call me? How come?”
“Where’s Beth?”
“I sent her to the country with the Cleary kids for a few days, my friend Isobel, you remember? I’m having trouble with my foot. The ligament is fucking ripped. It’s going to take another week, maybe more. I’m permanently high from painkillers, which ain’t bad,” she joked, but it fell flat.
“Been out dancing?”
She laughed. “Sure, with my two right feet. I tripped. I swear to God.” She laughed again.
“You didn’t tell me.”
“You think I look distinguished with the cane?” She was talking too fast. “I was worried about you, you fuck. I called you in New York yesterday, I called your cellphone. Are you OK? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
Lily leaned one hip against the door, then sat down heavily on a canvas chair, gesturing at the living room. “It’s wonderful. Isn’t it?”
There was something territorial in her tone. She showed me the place as if it were hers. She said it belonged to a friend of a friend, that she had rented it for a couple of weeks.
I said, “Is it for sale?”
She nodded. “Maybe. Do you like it?”
“Sure, but that’s not what I meant.” I lit a cigarette and let the subject go.
We went on the deck where there were armchairs and a table, the cushions stowed because of the weather. Lily leaned against me, pointed out the bridges over the Thames, an old power plant on the other bank, the Embankment and Cheyne Walk. Chelsea, she said. “I always loved it around here, it’s a dumb cliché, Americans, Chelsea, but I don’t care. I love it.”
Lily’s was the third houseboat down in a row of boats and barges, crammed, about twenty of them, against the Embankment, each one hoisted up over the mud of the riverbank on what looked like steel sledges.
Inside, the living room had floor-to-ceiling doors to the deck outside, there was a dining area, a kitchen, two bedrooms. From the window I could see big pots on the deck next door, bushes burdened with dead hydrangeas.
The room itself was brightly lit, filled with good retro stuff, a yellow canvas butterfly chair, a bean bag, some moulded plastic stuff, not my taste, but OK. Piles of Lily’s books were on the floors and chairs; her lap-top was open on the dining-room table.
She sat down again, then looked up at me. “So you thought, OK, fuck her, I won’t call, is that it?” She reached for some cigarettes, then tossed the pack on the table. When she got Beth, she quit smoking. “Fuck. Fuck this fucking foot. I’m sorry, it’s driving me nuts. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t nicer to you. I’m sorry I left home in a hurry. Please. Sit down, OK. I’ll try to talk to you. I missed you, Artie, and I’m, Christ, I’m sorry.”
“I’m hungry,” she said when we were still in bed. An hour after I got there, maybe two, we got up slowly, showered, dressed. I followed her up the street to the King’s Road where she nabbed a taxi away from a couple of German tourists and we both collapsed in back laughing. Lily sat tight against me. She was warm. She smelled great.
I watched the streets go by, got a glimpse of squares and parks, houses, buildings, cars going on the wrong side, black taxis, red buses, Hyde Park. Most of the leaves were gone, most of it was a blur. It was night and London seemed wet, cold and handsome. We stopped in front of a brightly lit restaurant. Lily handed the driver some money and said something that made him laugh. She was all laughs; this was a brittle Lily I didn’t know. The couple hours we spent in bed began to fade. She was nervous with me.
The front of the restaurant was all glass. Inside there was a bar, and near it a few tables, one in a window alcove. The rest of the big room was down a few steps.
Lily claimed the window table, sat down hard on a chair, put her bad leg on another, gestured for me to sit next to her and said, “I’m starving. And I could use a drink. Artie? Red? White?”
I didn’t answer her. She knows what I drink. I looked out of the window. Opposite the restaurant, the narrow street forked. There were fancy antique shops. One was full of chandeliers; the pellets of crystal glittered. Welcome to London.
I said, “Can I get a real drink here?”
Lily picked the green olives out of a dish of black and green.
The martini came. I drank it and looked out the window. The rain was driving down now in sheets against the huge expanse of glass window.
“What are you going to eat?”
I glanced at the menu. “I don’t care.”
She turned on a smile and said, “Don’t sulk, OK? I’m sorry sorry sorry sorry. I am glad to see you, you know.”
Around us the room was jammed. A woman, leaving, waved at Lily, another stopped by to kiss her and exchange gossip.
I watched the scene swirl behind Lily, like figures on a screen. “You feel like you belong in London, don’t you?”
Lily said, “I guess. I keep coming back. They like me,” she added. “They don’t know what to do with me, but they like me.”
“I like you,” I said. Then, to make it easy for her, I said, “You’re not coming home, are you? That’s why you’ve been stalling, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
She didn’t answer.
“The houseboat where you’re staying, you’re happy there.”
She hesitated. “I came to London because I was offered a job. I’m freelance, it was a job, no big deal. I was going to help make a documentary for home. It’s a good organization. It shelters the homeless everywhere.” Lily smiled ruefully. “You know I’m a guilty liberal. But it’s not because of Phillip Frye, God knows, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’s a self-obsessed jerk. Worse.”
“What’s that mean, worse?”
“Nothing. Look, it’s in spite of him. It’s his wife who designed the Life Bubble.”
“Life Bubble?”
“It’s a sort of i
nstant shelter for the homeless, it’s amazing, I swear it, Artie.”
“Oh, please, Lily!”
She ate a green olive. “I hate your fucking cynicism. Some things matter.” Lily held her hands tight together so the knuckles looked sharp and I could count them under the white skin. “I need to do something,” she said.
“You do do something.”
“Yeah, like what?”
“You take care of Beth. She’s a happy baby. You have a million friends who depend on you. You help them out. You make them laugh. You help me. I love you. We do stuff together. Jesus, Lily, what do you want? You write stuff that’s interesting. Good stuff. Useful. Funny stuff.”
“It’s magazines. It’s TV talk shows. It passes the time is all, nothing else. I mean, I look at what I do and I think, so fucking what?”
“You still want to save the world. You’re still trying to please your parents, is that it?”
She didn’t answer me.
“Where is it, this job?”
“Mostly here. Maybe a few days in Africa.”
“How long for?”
“A month or so.”
“What about Beth? She’s going to be alone for a month? At least let me take her home with me.”
“She’s not your child.”
“Boy, that’s real tough.” I started to get up. “But I get the message.”
“Sit down. If I need to go away for a few days, my friend Isobel’s here.”
“I see. So it’s still Frye, isn’t it, one way or the other.”
“I just finished telling you it’s much more complicated.”
“Why is it complicated, Lily? Why?”
She pressed her face against the window as if to cool it. The waiter put two plates of scallops in front of us and Lily said, “That looks good. Thanks.” Her accent never changed, but the rhythms, the inflections, had become British. She was a ventriloquist, miming the language. I was on the other side of a glass wall watching her.
Lily ate. I put my napkin on the table. Fumbled for my cigarettes and looked around.
She said, “You can smoke if you want.”
The waiter took away the plates and brought more food, a steak for lily, some liver for me. It smelled great. It tasted good. I wasn’t hungry.
“Why is it complicated?”
There was sweat on her forehead and she pushed her red hair off her face. She cleared her throat, played with her fork, ordered some more wine.
“Lily?”
Outside, on the rain-soaked street, the idiotic red buses lumbered up and down. Inside, the crowd sounded like animals braying.
“Artie?” Lily put her hand tentatively on my arm, like I might push her away.
“What?”
“I started coming to London when I was still a kid and I bought into it, the whole package, the writers, the accents, the bullshit, Henry James and Jimmy Hendrix and I loved it, and I kept coming back. Also, they never asked how you felt, which was perfect for me, an entire nation in denial, pre-Diana, of course. People just screwed around and had fun.” She smiled. “I had a friend who said to me if you’re an American and you’re gonna be in London, there’s two ways you can do it. There’s Henry James or Lily Hanes. And Lily Hanes is right. So I became me. Finally.”
“And Phil Frye?”
“Phillip was my ticket. Best people, best parties, that’s how I came to London in the first place. Phil was my ticket to the revolution.”
“What fucking revolution?”
“The Sixties,” she said, tone wry, but barely smiling. “Well, it was the Seventies by then, but he introduced me to John Lennon once.”
“You didn’t love Phillip when you took up with him?”
She looked at me sadly with the wide, pale, gray-blue eyes and hunched her shoulders. Lily drained her wine glass and cut a piece of meat but didn’t eat it. “I loved him. Yeah, whatever that means. Maybe I didn’t tell you this – I mean, you really don’t know, do you?”
“Know what? What?”
She pushed the plate away, wiped her mouth, shoved her hair off her neck for the tenth time and said, “I didn’t just take up with Phillip Frye.” Lily took a sip of her wine. “I married him.”
I felt like someone was standing on my windpipe. I couldn’t breathe right. I finished the wine in my glass. I pushed away my plate, crumbled a piece of bread, pushed it around, picked up an olive, ate it, didn’t look up. It was her lying that got me. The lie. The not knowing. The casual way Lily told me about it in a public place. First the picture of Thomas Pascoe in her drawer at home, now the lie about Phillip Frye.
The rain was making me crazy. The picture of the surfer came into my head again and stuck: I was caught in a wave I couldn’t handle, the board already gone in the curl, surf full of dismembered limbs: Lily, Callie Rizzi, Sverdloff, Gilchrist. I had jumped in and dragged them with me, and I figured if I didn’t get out from under, we’d all drown.
A Beach Boys tune started up, incongruous as hell, in my head. I’d heard someone sing it that morning they found Pascoe’s body at the Middlemarch pool. “Little Surfer Girl” played over and over. The noise was deafening in the restaurant. But all I said to Lily was, “Is there anything else? Anything you feel you want to tell me? Any other surprises? Anything else you forgot to mention?”
She took something out of her bag and handed it to me.
I looked at the envelope. “What is this?”
“Keys.”
“Keys.”
“Keys to the place we’re staying, Beth and me, and the address, and all the phone numbers.”
I felt the gun in my pocket. I didn’t belong here. The place was so noisy my head hurt; I pushed my chair back. “I don’t want your fucking keys, Lily.”
“What do you want?”
“Like I said, I want to know if you got any more surprises for me. I want to know how come you change the rules all the time but I’m not allowed to. It’s like getting beat up, you know. One day things are fine, we’re OK, you, me, Beth, the next thing I know you’re leaving for London. Now I can’t see Beth because you’ve sent her to the country. What was it, she was the accessory of the year you had to have, the handbag of choice, like all the other over-forty girls? Or was it me, the accessory?”
“You don’t have to yell at me.”
“I’m not yelling at you.”
“It’s over. Phillip Frye and me. It’s been over for years. We got married, we got divorced. Phil remarried. OK, I know I saw him some after that, but it’s over. I swear to God. Whatever else you think about me, that’s the truth.” Her eyes filled up. She reached for my hand. “Don’t pull away from me. Please. Artie? I hate this. I miss you. Let me talk to you.”
Lily’s eyes were wet. She rarely cries. I didn’t care. She had a right to her life, but I didn’t have to like it.
I pushed the keys back across the table. “Like I said, I really don’t think I’ll be using these.”
Head bent slightly at an awkward angle, eyes avoiding mine, Lily said, “What surprises?”
I wanted to say, “How come you have a framed picture of Thomas Pascoe in your drawer, like a relic, like some icon. You fucked him too? Or what?” I wanted to push the picture in her face and say, “Tell me”, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to hear the lies. I didn’t ask.
She said, “I’m glad you’re in London. I want you here, I do, honest. OK? Tell me about the case. Please. Artie? I don’t want to hurt you.”
I zipped my jacket. “You’re doing a lousy job. What is it? I’m embarrassing you? I get the lingo wrong? I don’t fit in here?” I looked around the restaurant. “You know what, Lily? I’m just a regular American, an excop, OK? I can’t read all this shit and I don’t care. That’s all I am.”
“You get a lot of stuff wrong,” she said quietly, “but it’s not about the lingo. It’s not about London.”
“Then what is it I get wrong?”
“Me.”
Outside, rain dripping down my nec
k, searching for a cab, I turned to look through the window where Lily sat, and I saw her, alone at the table, her bad foot propped on a chair. She saw me look and raised her wine glass and tried to smile.
I went back to the apartment and switched on the radio. Risk of flooding, the radio voice whispered. Spring tides. Gale force winds. Tyne, Dogger, Fair Isle, Cromarty, Rockall, Faroes, Humpty Dumpty, what’s going on, I thought. I was so groggy I couldn’t focus. It was late. I was restless. I put on the TV and there was an old movie and I went and got some Scotch and climbed under the covers.
I flipped the TV channels, got the weather on BBC. A nerdy weatherman appeared on the box wearing a jacket like I’d never seen on TV, or in real life: a short bad jacket like a clown would wear, buttoned tight across his stomach.
There were gale warnings, he said. Stuff coming across the Atlantic, some kind of hump under a low, that was causing heavy rains followed by “spits and spots”. Just fucking tell me, I thought: is it gonna rain? I figured maybe he was a joke weatherman; maybe like we got fat weather guys, they have geeks. If I’d been with Lily, we would have laughed about it. Or maybe it wasn’t funny for her anymore. Maybe it was only part of the scenery for her in a town where she belonged.
The time difference had caught up with me. The windows rattled like animals caught in a cage. I got up, but the windows were locked. I poured an inch of Scotch in the coffee mug, took it back in the bedroom, sprawled on the bed, turned on the TV.
My legs burned from walking. On cable, I found an ancient Hitchcock picture with Tallulah Bankhead I’d never seen. Lifeboat. Tallulah, William Bendix, they swam in front of me, but I fell asleep with the sound on before anyone in the picture went overboard.
23
God, it’s cold, I thought the next morning as I climbed the factory stairs to Warren Pascoe’s studio. It was the coldest place I was ever in, an empty factory building on a stretch of waste ground. Paradise Street. Not far from the river. Signs announcing redevelopment of the area into “Luxury apartments” dangled from metal fencing. Rolls of barbed wire were stacked and left to rust.
Bloody London Page 19
